Our ways of living and loving have changed radically in the last decade. Today men and women are thrust together on the job, sharing the workplace in equal numbers and, increasingly often, as professional peers. Work is becoming a major source of intimate interaction between them as they daily share the physical proximity of working side by side, the stimulation of professional challenge, and the powerful passions of accomplishment and failure.
Like every other kind of intimacy, the workplace variety brings with it the likelihood of sexual attraction. It is natural. It is inevitable, hard-wired as we are to respond to certain kinds of stimuli, although it sometimes comes as a surprise to those it strikes. But sexual attraction in the office is virtually inevitable for other reasons as well: The workplace is an ideal pre-screener, likely to throw us together with others our own age having similar socioeconomic and educational backgrounds, similar sets of values, and similar aspirations.
It also offers countless opportunities for working friendships to develop. As teams come to dominate the structure of the business world, the other half of a business team is increasingly likely to be not only a colleague with complementary skills and interests, but also an attractive member of the opposite sex. As close as the collaboration between men and women workers can get at the office, it may be even more so outside it, as workers today function in an extended workplace of irregular hours and non-office settings. We are now more likely than ever, for example, to share the intimate isolation of business travel.
Such opportunity for interaction between the sexes is, in the grand scheme of things, really rather new. “Only in the last 20 years, particularly the last 10 have women worked in equal numbers with men, and....
